Some Jewish officials
are more concerned about the US authorities' apparent
interest in snaring two America Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) staffers in an alleged spy scandal than
with the future of AIPAC or their own efforts in Capitol
Hill.

"There are a lot of questions to ask: Why all this
energy, all this effort?" said Abraham Foxman, national
director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), relating
to the disclosures that Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin
allegedly shared top secret intelligence information with
two high-level AIPAC staffers. "It's a very broad
investigation in terms of the persons interviewed. Why
engage in a sting vis- -vis Jewish institutions? There
are a lot of questions unanswered."

Foxman suggested that the FBI's interest
in AIPAC may point to underlying bias, and a suspicion
among US authorities that Jews in America are more loyal
to Israel than to the US. That is especially troubling
to the ADL, because the dual-loyalty charge carries with
it anti-Semitic overtones for many American Jews.

"One out of three Americans believes
that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United
States. That's a classic anti-Semitic attitude,"
Foxman said. "Washington is not immune."

Indeed, Foxman and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman
of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations suggested, this might factor into decisions
to reject US Jews for foreign-service jobs – something
American Jews have complained about for some time.

Hoenlein said he gets complaints all the time from Jews
claiming they've been denied access to security-sensitive
posts because they are Jewish.

"There have been reports of people being denied
security clearance again, and whether it's related to
this or not we can't tell," Hoenlein said.

FBI spokeswoman Debbie Weierman said the bureau had no
comment.

When AIPAC brought 5,000 supporters to its annual policy
conference in Washington three weeks ago, the organization
sought to demonstrate publicly that its work would not
be hampered by the controversy surrounding the two ex-AIPAC
officials caught up in a spy scandal.

And to all outward appearances, it seemed that the group
was not suffering much fallout from the disclosure that
Franklin allegedly handed over intelligence information
to AIPAC research director Steven Rosen and Iran analyst
Keith Weissman.

AIPAC moved quickly to fire the two, paid for lawyers
to defend them against any possible espionage charges
and announced to conference delegates that, in the words
of executive director Howard Kohr, "Your presence
here today sends a message to every adversary of Israel,
AIPAC and the Jewish community that we are here and here
to stay."

But behind this veneer of strength, officials at Jewish
groups that work with Capitol Hill say they are monitoring
closely a situation that could change if Rosen and Weissman
are indicted. There is some concern that if they are criminally
charged, a high-profile espionage trial, similar to the
Johnathan Pollard case, could stoke fears among some in
America, including US officials, that American Jews are
more loyal to Israel than to the US.

"Things did not turn out exactly as predicted,"
said Neil Goldstein, executive director of the American
Jewish Congress. "They said there is nothing to it;
it'll all go away. Clearly, they've taken actions now
that belie that, and clearly there are things that are
still going on."

"What can I tell you? It has us all nervous,"
said David Zweibel, executive vice president for government
and public affairs at Agudath Israel of America.

"It is in general a time of some nervousness about
our relationships on Capitol Hill and, more generally,
in federal Washington," Zweibel said. Nevertheless,
he allowed, "There has not yet been any tangible
sign of pulling back or reluctance or anything in terms
of ongoing relationships."

For now, Jewish organizational officials insist that
AIPAC's troubles have not really affected them or their
work.

"We have not been impacted, to the
best of our knowledge," said Foxman. "Nothing
has changed vis-a-vis Congress. We meet on many issues,
including the Middle East."

Hoenlein echoed that sentiment. "Operationally,
I would say that it has not impacted in any way that we
can discern," he said. "I think the community
should stand by AIPAC and Rosen and Weissman, who have
served the community and made great contributions."

Even if the two are indicted – which some news
reports based on anonymous sources have suggested is imminent
– that should not change anything, he said.

"Indictments are not convictions," Hoenlein
said. "From what we know, it would be very hard to
convict somebody for what has been said so far."

Underlying Jewish groups' continued support for AIPAC
is the conviction many share that Rosen and Weissman were
set up in an FBI sting operation that hinged upon the
cooperation of a Pentagon analyst who already was in trouble
with the law for disclosing top secret information related
to America's national defense.

The analyst, Franklin, was arrested in May, posted bond
and had a preliminary hearing in his case on Thursday.

He is charged with leaking top secret information to
two men – said to be the AIPAC staffers –
at an Arlington, Virginia restaurant on June 26, 2003,
as well as with breaking FBI rules on the handling of
classified documents. The information Franklin allegedly
shared with the AIPAC staffers – who are not mentioned
by name in any of the indictments against Franklin –
related to potential attacks on US and Israeli agents
in Iraq by Iranian-backed forces.

While Franklin, a 25-year veteran of the Department of
Defense, seems to have broken the law by disclosing classified
information that could be used "to the injury of
the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation,"
it is not at all clear that Rosen and Weissman broke any
laws by receiving it.

Even though they reportedly relayed that information
to an Israeli Embassy official – so far, the most
damning piece of information against them – they
also notified the White House and reportedly have said
that they were unaware the information was classified.

AIPAC officials say they have been reassured that the
organization is not being investigated.

"It's been told consistently it's not a target of
this," said Nathan Lewin, the Washington lawyer AIPAC
hired to deal with the case. "Whatever the government
does with regard to this investigation, it is not directed
at AIPAC."

Comment:
Ah, tis a hornet's nest in the pyramid of entropy: so
many different factions competing for control. Who is
at the top?

There is clearly a very strong and powerful Jewish lobby
in the United States. No one denies that fact. Jewish
publications brag about it, Israeli prime ministers make
reference to it, and US politicians know they must adapt
their foreign policy to promote Israel as the lone beacon
of democracy in the Middle East to accommodate it.

The various Jewish lobby groups and associations in the
United States do not deny that their groups have an influence
that far outweighs the 2-3% Jewish portion of the US population.
In many facets of American life, Jews have made important
contributions and have gained positions of power. Many
of these people identify very strongly with their background,
many identify strongly with Israel, and many contribute
financially to support these causes, and because they
are successful, they have big bucks to put behind them.

The evolution of US foreign policy since the 1967 Arab-Israeli
war shows a significant shift in US support for Israel.
It has become an unquestioning support, one that is completely
one-sided. During this period, there have been a number
of episodes of Israeli spying upon its great friend and
benefactor, of which the Franklin case is but the latest.
All along the Israelis deny that they are engaged in espionage
against the US, but time after time this has been shown
to be a lie. Monica Lewinsky, bizarre arrests of Israeli
movers and their subsequent deportation to Israel with
no charges filed, Jonathan Pollard, and the USS Liberty
are a few of the events that come to mind in demonstrating
Israel's real activities in the US and towards the US.

Today, in the Bush Administration, the number of policy-makers
in key positions who are Jewish is impressive. Many of
those who are not Jewish are ardent public supporters
of AIPAC positions as well as the political line of the
Likud Party in Israel. The parade of US politicians who
presented their valentines to Israel at the recent AIPAC
conference in Washington well demonstrates this point.
A strong argument can be made that the invasion of Iraq
was carried out in the interests of Israel, as Saddam
was in no way a direct threat to the continental US. Many
politicians in Israel and neocons in the US have been
proposing the dismemberment of Iraq since the 1997 position
paper written for the Likud by current members or former
members of the Bush Administration.

Clearly there is a very strong influence of Israel in
US foreign policy. The Jewish lobby is doing effective
work. The article above suggests that this influence has
not been "impacted" by the Franklin revelations.

However, the Jewish lobby is not the only force at work.
There are other interests with views that do not always
coincide with it. There is a jockeying for position and
power in the upper echelons ranging from the use of personal
contacts and contributions to political campaigns, to
dirty tricks, disinformation, spying, blackmail and other
illicit means. The oil industries support for Saudi Arabia
appears to be one such bone of contention, and the efforts
we have seen attempting to tie the Saudis to 9/11 by the
likes of Michael Moore and Daniel Hopsicker may be shots
fired by the Jewish lobby against the oil lobby.

The phrase "lobby" has none of the connotations
one associates with "conspiracy", and yet when
one looks behind the phrase, you realise they are describing
pretty much the same thing: a small group of people who
have inordinate influence. "Lobby" is the sanitised
for mass consumption label that describes a process that
has been merchandised and branded as legitimate within
the "democratic" process, regardless of the
fact that it is by its very nature profoundly undemocratic:
the decision-making process is out of the hands of the
people and in the hands of those who can buy or blackmail
votes or politicians: the oil lobby, the pharmaceutical
lobby, the banking lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Christian
Zionist lobby, any of the others.

Where
there is power, there will also be minions, useful idiots,
and various forms of collaboration - be it for survival,
power, money, or other forms of material reward driven
by our basic motors of fear, sex, and survival. They are
collaborators with the enemy because the interests they
defend are not their own interests. Americans who collaborate
with the Bush regime are not working in the favour of
the interests of the American people; they are supporting
terror, unjust economics, the expansion of military spending
that could be used to provide housing, education, and
health for those at home; they are supporting the corporations
whose one and only boss is the shareholder -- and even
then recent years have seen CEOs and other executives
take severance packages that can in no way be justified
to shareholders.

As
we say, it is a rat's nest. Sorting it out is not easy.
The balance of power at any one time may be in one or
another group, or an (uneasy) alliance. Our working hypothesis
is that there is another power behind all of these, the
power at the top of the pyramid. That power is the real
puppet master, the one whose aims, whose true aims, may
not be known to any of the players we see in the public
sphere. This power consists of an alliance between certain
members of our realm and denizens of another realm completely,
the home of those beings we know in myth and legend as
the "gods" or ET.

Yes,
it sounds outlandish, impossible, and better suited to
the tabloids. However, there is an abundant mass of evidence
that points to this hypothesis as being very probable.
Many who dismiss such a possibility have never done the
research that would qualify them to make a decision one
way or another. They dismiss the idea because it is too
outlandish, not because of a lack of evidence. Other writings
on this site as well as the books
of Laura Knight-Jadczyk investigate the probability
of our working hypothesis. Works by Gurdjieff, Castaneda,
Charles Fort, John Keel, Jacques Vallée, certain
Gnostics and writers from the Eastern Orthodox tradition
explicitly or implicitly come to similar conclusions.
We do not ask our readers to take such assertions at face
value. It is necessary to do the research into these questions
for yourselves.

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon analyst
has been indicted on charges of passing classified information
and documents about a Middle Eastern country to two
employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group and a diplomat
from an unnamed country, court documents show.

Lawrence Franklin, who worked on the Pentagon's Iran
desk, was charged on four counts of communicating national
defense information to persons not entitled or authorized
to receive it, and two counts of conspiracy.

The indictment details a series of contacts in 2003
and 2004 in which Franklin allegedly divulged classified
information about an unnamed Middle Eastern country
to two employees of a Washington lobbying firm and a
foreign diplomat.

It gives no names other than Franklin's
but officials had previously identified the lobbying
firm as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The indictment did not say what
country the diplomat was from. Israel denied
any involvement in the case after Franklin's arrest
in May.

Franklin conspired and "did deliver, communicate
and transmit classified national defense information
in an effort to advance his own career, advance his
own personal foreign policy agenda, and influence persons
within and outside the United States government,"
the indictment read.

It said Franklin had "reason to believe that such
information could be used to the injury of the United
States and to the advantage of a foreign nation."

At a June 26, 2003 meeting, he allegedly passed "classified
information obtained by the processes of communication
intelligence from the communication of a foreign government,"
according to the indictment.

But it was unclear from the indictment
how damaging the leaks were.

Franklin, 58, appeared to have done little to hide
his activities.

He faxed classified documents from his office, called
his contacts on his office phone, and met in plain view
at the Pentagon with the foreign official who received
some of the classified information.

His meetings with AIPAC officials have been widely
reported. The indictment alleges he provided them with
a classified internal policy paper that he had written,
discussed with them top secret information related to
potential attacks on US forces in
Iraq, and classified information related to the intelligence
reporting activities of a foreign nation.

The court documents provide new details about his contacts
with a diplomat at an unidentified foreign embassy in
Washington between August 15, 2002 and June, 2004.

After an initial meeting at a Washington restaurant
on August 15, 2002, Franklin and the diplomat exchanged
phone calls at their offices for several months and
then met again in person near the embassy on or about
January 30, 2003, the indictment said.

"The subject of the discussion
at this meeting was a Middle Eastern country's nuclear
program," it said.

They met on May 2, 2003 at the Pentagon's Officer's
Athletic Club adjacent to the Pentagon, where they discussed
foreign policy issues and senior US officials, it said.

On May 23, 2003, they again met at the Pentagon's Officer's
Athletic Club.

"At this meeting, the two discussed issues concerning
a Middle Eastern country and its nuclear program and
the views held by Europe and certain United States government
agencies with regard to that issue," the indictment
said.

Franklin later drafted an "action
memo" to his superiors incorporating suggestions
made by the foreign official, it said.

There followed a series of meetings between the two
at the Pentagon Officer's Athletic Club and at a sandwich
shop near the State Department.

During a meeting February 13, 2004,
the foreign official suggested a meeting with someone
who had previously been associated with his country's
intelligence services. He also gave Franklin a gift
card, the indictment said.

Franklin met with the man with intelligence connections
a week later in the Pentagon cafeteria "and discussed
a Middle Eastern country's nuclear program."

On June 8, 2004, Franklin met with the foreign official
at a Washington coffee house.

"At this meeting, the defendant
provided the FO (foreign official) with classified information
he had learned from a classified United States government
document related to a Middle Eastern country's activities
in Iraq. The defendant was not authorized to
disclose this classified information to the FO,"
the indictment said.

The indictment also alleges that sometime between December
2003 and June 2004, Franklin disclosed to the foreign
officer classified information related to a weapon test
conducted by a Middle Eastern country.

Comment: Gee,
we wonder which country this mysterious "foreign
diplomat" was from... Here's a hint: What country
has the US gone out of its way to protect no matter
what the cost, including ignoring the mystery country's
massive nuclear program?

JERUSALEM - Israel's
usually rock-solid relations with the United States
were taking a battering as a row over arms sales to
China escalated ahead of a crucial visit to the region
by Washington's top diplomat.

Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Israeli parliament's
foreign affairs and defence committee and an ally of
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said ties were now at crisis
point but stressed that Israel must fight to retain
a measure of independence from its its key ally.

The comments came after the Pentagon confirmed on Monday
that the Bush administration had raised concerns with
Israel about its sales and transfer of military equipment
and technology to China.

The formal indictment of a Pentagon analyst on charges
of passing classified information to a pro-Israel lobby
group served as a further reminder that all was not
well in the relationship.

The support of US President George
W. Bush has been vital for Sharon in his efforts to
secure approval for his controversial plan to pull troops
and settlers out of the Gaza Strip, an issue
that will top the agenda of Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice's visit to Jersualem this weekend.

Sharon has been trying to play down the China sales
row, declining to make it a major issue on recent trip
to the United States, seemingly fearful of upsetting
Washington with the start of the Gaza pullout now just
two months away.

But Steinitz said there was no denying the seriousness
of the situation.

"There is a crisis. It has been
going on for about a year, and to my great regret, even
Sharon's visit to Washington didn't resolve this crisis,"
he said.

"There is no doubt that relationship with the
United States is critical to Israel. But, with all the
enormous importance of US diplomatic, economic and military
help, Israel must keep its independence and also some
reciprocity in this relationship," he said.

Two months ago, Washington imposed a series of sanctions
on Israel's defence industry following a controversial
weapons deal in which Israel was to upgrade a consignment
of drones it had sold to China. [...]

The defence ministry would not comment on reports that
its director general Amos Yaron was being forced to
step down as a result of US pressure, but said there
had been no formal request from Washington to remove
him.

While acknowledging that Israel
cannot simply ignore Washington's views, the Maariv
daily said "perhaps the time has come for somebody
-- the prime minister for example -- to put a stop to
the grovelling which has recently been forced upon the
Israeli defense establishment." [...]

Editors' Note: Thomas Donnelly is a paradigm neo-con.
These days he shuttles between the Project for the New
American Century and the American Enterprise Institute
His CV traces his ascent, from that seedbed of militarism,
Sidwell Friends Quaker School, through flack work for
Lockheed Martin, a Congressional Committee, the Army
Times, The National Interest, and now the AEI and the
Project for the NAC. Last Friday, Donnelly, in a talk
at the AEI, launched his new pamphlet "The Military
We Need". The session was in the appropriately
named Wohlstetter Room, named for the Godfather of the
Neocons. CounterPunch's Winslow Wheeler was there, to
hear the neo-con vision of the shape of things to come.
AC / JSC

It was shall we say, an interesting experience. I would
not call it mind-expanding, but there definitely were
many stretched neurons in the Wohlsetter Conference Room
at AEI that day.

The pretext was the coming forth of a pamphlet by Donnelly,
"The Military We Need," available for free at
http://www.aei.org/books/ The UPI review of this work
handed out at the event says Donnelly "transcends
easy labels" including "neo-conservative,"
"nationalist," and "neo-imperialist."
While the terminology may seem a bit too polite, it is
also incomplete.

In his pamphlet, Donnelly cites his goals for Bush Administration
policy. These I see as surrogates for what the neo-conservatives
(for lack of a better term, right now) as a group see
as the next stage of their policy advocacy. Given what
Donnelly called Bush's "rapid success" in Afghanistan
and the "last legs" on which Vice President
Cheney now sees the insurgents in Iraq so wobbily staggering,
what, do you wonder, have these authors of American policy
for the last five years mapped out for us in the future?

Donnelly wants five things:

* "Build new alliances," meaning bag Europe,
embrace India, which will be needed in the confrontation
with China.

* "Expand active duty army by at least 125,000
soldiers," but given the active Army's current
shrinkage given its recruitment problems ­ driven
by current policy ­ he didn't breath the "d"
word, which would seem to be an essential component.

* "Create naval and air forces that reflect a
"high-low" mix of capabilities," meaning
gun boats (Littoral Combat Ships) for the Navy and more
air transports for the "expeditionary land forces."

* "Increase 'baseline' defense spending by $100
billion per year," meaning in excess of $600 billion
for DoD per year (baseline plus Iraq) and build on that
as unfolding operations pose additional requirements.
(They haven't gotten off the percent of GDP measure
of defense spending for the Cold War and can't stand
it that we're nowhere near 8-10%.)

And, here's my favorite,

"Create new networks of overseas bases," which
is explained as a "semipermanent ring of 'frontier
forts' along the American security perimeter from West
Africa to East Asia." Plus, as Donnelly explained
in his verbal comments, the US "homeland" (not
to be confused with the above mentioned "American
security perimeter" from Morocco to Japan) includes
the area defined in the Monroe Doctrine, i.e. the Caribbean
and Central America.

While the "frontier fort" terminology may be
intended to give this thinking a homey American connotation,
I think the use of the term more useful in its being revealing.
It invokes not just some of the saddest chapters in domestic
American history in the form of the ethnic cleansing of
native Americans away from the path of others seeking
living space (which Donnelly no doubt recalls as Hollywood,
not history) but it also speaks to the messianic, manifest
destiny quality ­ a sense of righteous entitlement
­ that these people ooze through every pore. Add to
that the Monroe Doctrine, in truth applied to the rest
of the world except Europe and Russia, i.e. against almost
exclusively non-white races and cultures, and you have
it all.

I had only one uplifting moment as I listened to Donnelly
preach. Earlier that same week, national newspapers were
carrying poll results showing a continuation of the trend
toward collapse of American popular support for the war
in Iraq, collapse in the belief that that the war "against
terror" is being led competently, collapse in support
for the President in general. The Democrats didn't do
much better either. Small "d" democratic support
for Donnelly's strategic vision is nowhere to be found
and shrinks the more Americans hear about its impact.
If we remain a functioning democracy, it is a plan for
action that may bring more regime change to America than
to China and other neo-con enemies in the making.

Indeed, neo-con does not even begin to describe the genre.
UPI's "nationalist" and even "neo-imperialist"
seems completely inadequate. "Lunatic" or even
"dangerous menace" comes to mind but falls into
the excessive rhetoric of these times. I'll be positive
and an optimist and call them "a past embarrassment
of the future."

Gore Vidal is certainly
correct - the United States of America is more rightly
deemed the United States of Amnesia. Our political memory
lasts about thirty minutes, or until the next television
programming slot. Some of us, however, are elephants when
it comes to political memory. Otherwise ephemeral events
stick in our craw and emerge later to make sense.

For instance, Richard Perle.

Most Americans have no idea who Richard Perle is, even
though he "served" as the chairman of the Defense
Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004, that
is until he was booted from that Strausscon-infested committee
for shady business dealings at the expense of the American
people. Although Perle kept a more or less low profile
after his sacking, he wandered into the media spotlight
briefly last year when he spoke on behalf of Mujahedin-e
Khalq (MEK) at the Washington Convention Center. MEK is
an anti-Iranian mullah "opposition group" listed
by the State Department as a terrorist organization. "MEK
may have an interest in this event or may attempt to use
the event to raise funds," the Treasury Department
told the Washington Post. Perle claimed innocence, although
the keynote speaker at the event was MEK leader Maryam
Rajavi, who addressed the audience via videophone from
Paris. A few of us paying attention at the time - for
this was truly a two minute news item - saw smoke and
fire: in essence, Perle was bestowing Strausscon laurels
on the terrorist MEK.

As Laura Rozen wrote last December, MEK serves "the
political agenda of the Bush administration… it's
no wonder that hawks in the Bush administration are lobbying
for the MEK as a means to promote their goal of regime
change. Some Iran watchers say that a mutual working relationship
between Washington and [MEK] has already been agreed to,
one which includes the U.S. debriefing of MEK members
at Camp Ashraf in Iraq for Iran intelligence information."
Dan Byman, a former Middle East analyst at the CIA now
affiliated with the Brookings Institution, told Rozen
the Bushites "will use them, but not de-list them
[as terrorists]… We have control of MEK facilities
in Iraq… and we are taking advantage of it, and
not shutting them down."

In then, earlier today, bombs mysteriously explode in
Ahvaz, Iran, near the Iraqi border, and Tehran, killing
nine people a few days ahead of the Iranian elections.
"The Ahvaz bombs appeared to be placed outside official
buildings or the homes of senior officials, while the
Tehran blast was near a public square," reports CBC
News. "There is no explanation for the attacks, but
an Iranian official suggested the bombs were linked to
the presidential elections set for Friday."

"The terrorists of Ahvaz infiltrated Iran from the
region of Basra (in southern Iraq)," Ali Agha Mohammadi,
a top national security official, told AFP. "These
terrorists have been trained under the umbrella of the
Americans in Iraq."

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just
one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this
as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian
campaign," a former high-level intelligence official
told Seymour Hersh and The New Yorker earlier this year.
Hersh reported that Bush has already "signed a series
of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing
secret commando groups and other Special Forces units
to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist
targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and
South Asia."

"No one immediately claimed responsibility for the
attacks, the deadliest in the Islamic Republic in more
than a decade and a rarity since the Iran-Iraq war ended
in 1988," notes Knight Ridder. "But Iranian
television, which is controlled by Iran's conservative
powerbrokers, accused the bombers of trying to disrupt
this coming Friday's presidential elections."

Is it possible the MEK - with a track record for violence
against not only Iranians but Americans as well - is responsible
for the deadly attacks inside Iran? Nobody knows for sure
but with the Strausscon's well-advertised desire to foment
chaos and bring down the mullahocracy, it should not be
overlooked.

It should also not be overlooked that Scott Ritter and
others have predicted something would happen in Iran this
month. Ritter, appearing at the Capitol Theater in Olympia,
Washington, in February "held up the specter of a
day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively
minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration."

Is it possible the opening salvos of that conflagration
were fired this weekend?

A
former chief economist in the Labor Department during
President Bush's first term now believes the official
story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying
it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed
the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers
at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an
'inside job' and a government attack on America would
be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former
member of the Bush team who also served as director of
the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for
Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University,
also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists
alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific
conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to
the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance
of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse
of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds
this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If
the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe
it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering
analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's
collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms.
Only professional demolition appears to account for the
full range of facts associated with the collapse of the
three buildings.

"More importantly, momentous political
and social consequences would follow if impartial observers
concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile,
the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers
everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis
of 9/11 right."

However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's
security state' remains challenging because he claims
explosives and structural experts have been intimidated
in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration
claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the
towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed,
they have been hard pressed to disprove the government
theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA
prior to independent investigation.

Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up
the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed
to address the major evidence contradicting the official
version of 9/11.

Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government
jet fuel theory include:

-- Photos showing people walking around
in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons
of jet fuel supposedly was burning..

--When the South Tower was hit, most
of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning
for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain
and control without a total collapse.

--The fire did not grow over time,
probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was
suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices
the firs could have been easily controlled.

--FDNY fire fighters still remain
under a tight government gag order to not discuss the
explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are
also under a similar 9/11 gag order.

--Even the flawed 9/11 Commission
Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs
present believed that a total collapse of either tower
was possible."

-- Fire had never before caused steel-frame
buildings to collapse except for the three buildings
on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise
since 9/11.

-- The fires, especially in the South
Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small.

-- WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane
and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth
floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed
in less than 10 seconds.

-- WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires
but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.

-- In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein,
the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander
on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest
thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.

-- It's difficult if not impossible
for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene)
to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.

Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the
Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored
any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for
the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing
that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an
intense fire thermally weakened structural components,
causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors
to pancake onto the floors below.

One who supports the official account is Thomas Eager,
professor of materials engineering and engineering systems
at MIT. He argues that the collapse occurred by the extreme
heat from the fires, causing the loss of loading-bearing
capacity on the structural frame.

Eagar points out the steel in the towers could have collapsed
only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent
of its strength," or around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
Critics claim his theory is flawed since the fires did
not appear to be intense and widespread enough to reach
such high temperatures.

Other experts supporting the official story claim the
impact of the airplanes, not the heat, weakened the entire
structural system of the towers, but critics contend the
beams on floors 94-98 did not appear severely weakened,
much less the entire structural system.

Further complicating the matter, hard evidence to fully
substantiate either theory since evidence
is lacking due to FEMA's quick removal of the structural
steel before it could be analyzed.Even
though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence
be kept for forensic analysis, FEMA had it destroyed or
shipped overseas before a serious investigation could
take place.

And even more doubt is cast over why FEMA acted so swiftly
since coincidentally officials had arrived the day before
the 9/11 attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war
game exercise, named "Tripod II."

Besides FEMA's quick removal of the debris, authorities
considered the steel quite valuable as New York City officials
had every debris truck tracked on GPS and even fired one
truck driver who took an unauthorized lunch break.

In a detailed analysis just released supporting the controlled
demolition theory, Reynolds presents a compelling case.

"First, no steel-framed
skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had
ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses
occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly
hit by aircraft, the third not," said Reynolds. "These
extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires
made it all the more important to preserve the evidence,
mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

"On fire intensity, consider this
benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia's Meridian
Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that 'beams
and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary
exposure, the columns continued to support their loads
without obvious damage.' Such an intense fire with consequent
sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance
to what we observed at the WTC."

After considering both sides of the 9/11 debate and
after thoroughly sifting through all the available material,
Reynolds concludes the government story regarding all
four plane crashes on 9/11 remains highly suspect.

"In fact, the government has failed to produce significant
wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful
day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in
Pennsylvania shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable
as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground," said
Reynolds. "Photographers reportedly were not allowed
near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation
Safety Board have investigated or produced any report
on the alleged airliner crashes."

Comment:
There is an impressive collection of evidence that has
been collected by 9/11 researchers since the events of
that fateful day that show how the official story promulgated
by the Bush administration is full of holes. Certainly,
each separate point can be argued. There is no smoking
gun, no one event or piece of evidence that will convince
the skeptic. It is the entire mass of evidence that weighs
so heavily against the official story, from the inaction
of US air defence to intercept the hijacked jets, the
collapse of three towers of metal from fire, an event
never before seen, the removal of the debris before the
investigation was complete, the futures trading on United
and American in the days prior to 9/11, the shooting down
of Flight 93 at the moment the passengers were taking
back control, the denial that it was shot down despite
the fact that the plane's debris was scattered over eight
miles (hard to reconcile with a crash), the lack of debris
in front of the Pentagon coupled with the initial eyewitness
reports from firefighters that there was no debris inside
the Pentagon either, the confiscation of security camera
videos of the crash by the FBI, videos that have never
been released to the public, the discrepancy between the
claim that the fire of the crash at the Pentagon was so
intense that it vaporised the plane yet left the remains
of the victims enough intact to be subject to DNA identification,
and on and on.

Stepping back to a different level, 9/11 was the event
that justified the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and
ushered in the new era of the "War on Terror",
a battle without end against whoever the US government
decides to call its enemy. This war can never be won,
yet it is insanely profitable for the war machine: the
arms merchants, the security industry, and anyone who
makes his living from killing and subjugating another.

For years those who saw through the lie have been crying
out, pointing to the holes in the official story. Now
that the occupation of Iraq is drawing out, it appears
that a goodly number of Americans are beginning to ask
themselves questions about their Commander-in-Chief. Asking
questions about the lies that got the US into Iraq is
not enough. The lies go so much deeper. The Bush Administration
carried out an attack against the people it was "elected"
to defend. It has been supported in this effort by the
Democratic Party, a party that has refused to look at
the evidence and face the facts.

Cleaning out the government will not be easy. It may
be impossible. But it is important for Americans to stop
being afraid to ask the difficult questions. They must
be willing to consider possibilities that are out of the
realm of the possible for most of them: they were attacked
by their own government.

How many Americans will be willing to look that one in
the eye and not flinch? What will be the consequences
for their country, and the rest of the world, if they
do not?

WASHINGTON,
June 12 - Lawyers representing detainees at GuantÃ¡namo
Bay, Cuba, say that there still
may be as many as six prisoners who were captured before
their 18th birthday and that the military has sought
to conceal the precise number of juveniles at the prison
camp.

One lawyer said that his client, a
Saudi of Chadian descent, was not yet 15 when he was
captured and has told him that he was beaten regularly
in his early days at GuantÃ¡namo, hanged by his wrists
for hours at a time and that an interrogator pressed
a burning cigarette into his arm.

The lawyer, Clive A. Stafford Smith, of London, said
in an interview that the prisoner, who is now 18 and
is identified by the initials M.C. in public documents,
told him in a recent interview at GuantÃ¡namo that he
was seized by local authorities in Pakistan about Oct.
21, 2001, a few months shy of his 15th birthday, and
taken to GuantÃ¡namo at the beginning of 2002.

Barbara Olshansky, a senior lawyer at the Center for
Constitutional Rights in New York, which is coordinating
a program to match volunteer lawyers with detainees,
said she believed he may be one of six current detainees
who were imprisoned at GuantÃ¡namo before their 18th
birthday.

Military authorities say the only juveniles at the
detention center were the three who were kept in a separate
facility from the main prison camp with more freedom
and activities. They were released in January 2004.

The dispute is clouded by two issues:
military authorities define a juvenile as someone younger
than 16 years of age, not 18, as do most human rights
groups. Further, the ages of the detainees brought
to GuantÃ¡namo as enemy combatants cannot be determined
with certainty, leaving officials to make estimates.

"They don't come with birth certificates," said Col.
Brad K. Blackner, the chief public affairs officer at
the detention camp. Col. David McWilliams, the chief
spokesman for the United States Southern Command in
Miami, which runs the prison operation, said that the
authorities were fairly confident of their estimates.
"We used bone scans in some cases and age was determined
by medical evidence as best we could," he said.

As to the mistreatment that M.C. reported, Colonel
McWilliams said the military tried to investigate all
credible accusations where possible, but he would not
discuss the prisoner's specific complaints.

The details of M.C.'s accusations are contained in
a 17-page account prepared by Mr. Stafford Smith, in
which the prisoner said that
he was suspended from hooks in the ceiling for hours
at a time with his feet barely missing the floor, and
that he was beaten during those sessions. M.C. said
a special unit known as the Immediate Reaction Force
had knocked out one of his teeth and later an interrogator
burned him with a cigarette. Mr. Stafford Smith
said he saw the missing tooth and the burn scar.

Some of M.C.'s descriptions match accounts given not
only by other detainees, but also by former guards and
interrogators who have been interviewed by The New York
Times.

He describes being shackled close to the floor in
an interrogation room for hours with music blaring and
lights in his face. He also said he was shown a room
with pictures of naked women and adult videos and told
he could have access if he cooperated. His description
fits the account of former guards who described such
a room and said it was nicknamed "the love shack."

The three detainees released
in January 2004 were thought by officials of the International
Committee of the Red Cross to have been ages 12 to 14
at the time. [...]

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court
refused Monday to be drawn into a dispute over President
Bush's power to detain American terror suspects and
deny them traditional legal rights.

It would have been unusual for the court to take the
case of "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla
now, because a federal appeals court has not yet ruled
on the issue. Arguments are scheduled for July 19 at
the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.

A year ago, the court ruled the Bush administration
was out of line by locking up foreign terrorist suspects
at the Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without access
to lawyers and courts.

But justices declined to address a
separate issue: whether American citizens arrested on
U.S. soil can be designated "enemy combatants"
and held without trial.

Padilla has been in custody since 2002 when he was
arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after
returning from Pakistan. The government views him as
a militant who planned attacks on the United States,
including with a dirty bomb radiological device, and
has said he received weapons and explosives training
from members of al Qaeda.

A federal judge sided with Padilla and ruled that an
endorsement of indefinite detentions would be a "betrayal
of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers
that safeguards our democratic values and individual
liberties."

Solicitor General Paul Clement, the
Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer, said
the lower court ruling "marks a substantial judicial
intrusion into the core presidential function of determining
how best to ensure the nation's security."

Padilla's lawyers had wanted to jump over the appeals
court and have the Supreme Court intervene.

"Delay increases the chance that Padilla could
be faced with an unconstitutionally coerced choice --
for example, whether to plead guilty to a crime or to
give up other rights in order to avoid further months
of detention as an enemy combatant," his lawyers
told justices in a filing.

The court is already familiar with Padilla's case,
which they debated last fall but then threw out on grounds
that Padilla's lawsuit had been filed in the wrong jurisdiction.

The latest round comes from South Carolina, where Padilla
is in a Navy brig.

Padilla, a New York-born convert to
Islam, was one of two U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants,
a designation that allows indefinite detention without
charges for al Qaeda suspects and their associates.

The other one, Yaser Esam Hamdi,
was released last fall after winning a Supreme Court
appeal. The justices said Hamdi, a U.S.-born
suspected Taliban foot soldier captured in Afghanistan,
could use American courts to argue that he was being
held illegally.

The Monday case is Padilla v. Commander C.T. Hanft,
04-1342.

Comment: It's
a good thing the Supreme Court is playing ball again,
because the Bush administration might look like a bunch
of criminals if they'd end up detaining two US citizens
who were later acquitted and freed.

George
W. Bush is in no danger of being ranked among the nation's
pre-eminent commanders in chief. Not only has he been
unable thus far to win the war in Iraq, but on his watch
significant sectors of the proud U.S. military have
been rapidly deteriorating.

The Army reported on Friday that it had fallen short
of its recruitment goals for a fourth consecutive month.
The Marines managed to meet their recruitment target
for May, but that was their first successful month this
year.

Scrambling to fill its ranks, the
Army is signing up more high school dropouts and lower-scoring
applicants.

With the war in Iraq going badly and allegations of
abuse by military personnel widespread, young men and
women are increasingly deciding that there's no upside
to a career choice in which the most important skills
might be ducking bullets and dodging roadside bombs.

The primary reason the U.S. went to an all-volunteer
military in 1973 was to ensure that those who did not
want to fight wouldn't have to. That option is now being
overwhelmingly exercised, discretion being the clear
choice over valor. Young people
and their parents alike are turning their backs on the
military in droves.

The Army is so desperate for even
lukewarm bodies that it is reluctant to release even
problem soldiers, troops who are seriously out of shape,
or pregnant, or abusing alcohol or drugs. And it is
lowering standards for admission to the junior officer
ranks. For example, minor criminal offenses that previously
would have been prohibitive can now be overlooked.

At the same time Army recruiters have been chasing
high school kids with such reckless abandon that a backlash
is developing among parents who, in many cases, want
the recruiters kept out of their children's schools.

"To the extent that we think students are threatened
by recruiters, it's our job to intervene," said Amy
Hagopian, a co-chair of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association
at Garfield High School in Seattle. Ms. Hagopian, who
has an 18-year-old son, complained that recruiters too
often put the hard sell on impressionable high school
youngsters without informing them of the potential dangers
of a life in the military.

Recruiters with the gift of gab go
into the schools with a glamorous pitch, bags full of
goodies for the kids (T-shirts, donuts, key chains)
and a litany of promises they often can't keep. The
kids don't hear much about their chances of being maimed
or killed, or the trauma that often results from killing
someone else.

(A soldier's job is to kill. I can
still hear the drill sergeants in basic training screaming
at us decades ago: "What are you? What are you?" And
we'd scream back: "Killers! Killers!" And the sergeants
would say, "What is your purpose?" And we would shout:
"To kill! To kill!")

The Army, frantically searching for solutions, is
offering enlistments as short as 15 months and considering
bonuses worth up to $40,000. But it may be facing a
problem too difficult for any amount of money to overcome.
Americans are catching on to the hideousness and apparent
futility of the war in Iraq. Five marines were killed
in a single bomb attack in western Iraq on Thursday.
On Friday, a front-page Washington Post headline described
the effort to rebuild the Iraqi military as "Mission
Improbable."

A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that
nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the number
of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, and 60 percent
believe the war was not worth fighting.

There's something frankly embarrassing
about a government offering trinkets to children to
persuade them to go off and fight - and perhaps die
- in a war that their nation should never have started
in the first place. It's highly questionable
whether most high school kids are equipped to make an
informed decision about joining the military, which
is exactly why they're targeted. The additional knowledge
and maturity gained in the first few years after high
school make it easier for a young man or woman to make
a wiser, more meaningful choice, pro or con.

The parents of the kids being sought by recruiters
to fight this unpopular war are creating a highly vocal
and potentially very effective antiwar movement. In
effect, they're saying to their own children: hell no,
you won't go.

The
United States will "have to face" a dilemma on restoring
the military draft as rising casualties in Iraq result
in persistent shortfalls in military recruitment, a
top US senator has warned.

Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, made the prediction after new data
released by the Pentagon showed the US army failing
to meet its recruitment targets for four straight months.

"We're going to have to face that question," Biden
said on NBC's "Meet the Press" television show when
asked if it was realistic to expect restoration of the
draft.

"The truth of the matter is, it is going to become
a subject, if, in fact, there's a 40% shortfall in recruitment.
It's just a reality," he said.

The comment came after the Department of Defence announced
on Friday that the army had missed its recruiting goal
for May by 1661 recruits, or 25%. Similar losses have
been reported by army officials every month since February.

But experts said even that figure was misleading because
the army has quietly lowered its May recruitment target
from 8050 to 6700 people.

That has prompted charges that the real shortfall
was closer to 40%, which in turn has led to questions
about the future viability of the army as a force, if
it continues to be plagued by lack of new recruits.

Monthly shortfall

Since October, the army has recruited more than 8000
fewer people than it had hoped to, which amounts to
a loss of about a modern brigade.

The army, navy and marine corps reserves also fell
short of their monthly goals by 18%, 6%and 12% respectively,
according to the figures.

Recruitment at the Army National Guard was down 29%
while the Air National Guard fell short 22%.

The United States abandoned the military draft in
1973, following mass protest during the Vietnam War,
and switched to an all-volunteer force.

Registered draftees

Mandatory registration for the draft
was suspended in 1975 but resumed in 1980 after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. About 13.5 million men
are currently registered with the US government as potential
draftees.

During the 2004 election campaign, Democratic presidential
nominee John Kerry repeatedly accused President George
Bush of planning to re-instate "a back-door draft,"
charges the president vehemently denied.

But while admitting that restoring the draft would
be politically "very difficult," Senator Patrick Leahy,
the ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
said something will have to be done because the situation
with recruitment was not likely to improve.

Severe problems ahead

"If you think you have trouble getting recruits today,
you're going to have far more trouble six months from
now," Leahy predicted on CBS's "Face the Nation" program.
"It is not going to get better. That's going to get
worse."

It had been the worst of blind dates; the no-show.
Eventually, just before 2 a.m., Tommy Hook conceded
defeat and slunk away from the gaudy strip bar. As he
traipsed across the neon-bathed parking lot of Cheeks
nightclub, he would have wondered what became of his
non-committal partner.

Hours earlier Hook, 52, had received a call from a
fellow employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
imploring him to head to the Santa Fe nightspot and
hover by the bar. An excited, hushed voice had promised
to corroborate Hook's explosive findings into massive
financial irregularities at the birthplace of the nuclear
bomb and proposed site for the Bush administration's
new generation of atomic weapons.

Instead it is the brutal events that followed Hook's
short walk that have plunged the top secret home of
the U.S. weapons project into fresh controversy.

The attack was ferocious; a group of up to six men
stomped on the head of Hook, a former internal auditor
at Los Alamos, with such intensity that footprint marks
were still visible on his swollen face days later. A
witness claimed that without the intervention of the
club's bouncer, Hook would have been murdered. His wife
Susan later alleged that the assailants told her husband
during the beating that "if you know what's good for
you, you'll keep your mouth shut".

The attack last week came 48 hours before U.S. government
investigators were scheduled to arrive at Hook's home
and scrutinize audits detailing financial irregularities
amounting to millions of taxpayer dollars at the New
Texas laboratory. Now he has been silenced.

His shattered jaw remained wired shut throughout his
30th wedding anniversary on Friday. The incident at
Cheeks has reopened a trail of unsolved murders, harassment
and ongoing death threats that continues to plague America's
controversial nuclear weapons program.

The Observer has tracked down former whistleblowers
and U.S. congressional investigators who claim that
people are risking serious harm by exposing flaws in
the U.S. atomic project at a time when the Bush administration
is intent on resuming nuclear weapons production for
the first time in 15 years. The attack has even wider
ramifications, coinciding with new evidence revealing
Britain's close involvement with the Los Alamos laboratory.

Peter Stockton spent last Thursday scrutinizing the
Cheeks car park for clues. Claims of a row over a parking
accident and an altercation at the bar were soon dismissed.
Neither Hook's wallet nor his red Subaru sedan was stolen.
Stockton, a former congressional investigator, was deeply
troubled by the similarities of the Hook beating and
a case that has haunted him for almost 30 years.

In 1974, he investigated the death of Karen Silkwood,
the nuclear company employee who died in an unexplained
one-car crash many suspect was deliberately caused by
her employers. Having spent months gathering evidence
of corruption and contamination at the Kerr McGee site
(in Oklahoma), Silkwood drove to meet a New York Times
journalist with the proof. She never arrived. Subsequent
investigations found that tracks were consistent with
her car being forced off the road. The evidence that
Silkwood was carrying with her has never been found.
Her story became a Hollywood movie.

Hook too, was about to expose allegations of misconduct
against the powerful nuclear lobby. He had been scheduled
to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee
this month on his allegations. A first meeting with
government investigators was arranged for last Wednesday.

Stockton said that the public's largely favorable reaction
to the recent unveiling of Deep Throat's identity in
the Watergate affair was unusual. "Whistleblowers have
been harassed or fired. It is still a dangerous game,
particularly in the nuclear sector", he told The Observer.

Greg Mellor, who has been leading the Los Alamos Study
Group for 13 years, has observed the mood in the remote
outpost turning increasingly belligerent against those
prepared to speak out about goings-on at the laboratory."

A lot of people have been threatened, including myself,"
he said. "Los Alamos used to be full of liberal scientists,
it was predominantly democratic with a lot of partying.
Now it is very conservative. People feel that if you
take a swipe at the labs you are taking a swipe at them."

One Los Alamos employee created a political storm recently
after being sacked for exposing large-scale theft at
the lab. That followed the unsolved death in 1999 of
Lee Scott Hall, who had uncovered a serious flaw in
the troubled $1 billion (Â£700 million) weapons testing
program at the Lawrence Livermore laboratories, close
ally of its Los Alamos counterpart. The 54-year-old
had been stabbed 10 times in his bedroom. No motive
was established for the murder nor was anything stolen
from his home. No one was ever arrested.

This weekend allies of Hook will continue wondering
how his attackers remain at large. However, no allegations
have been forwarded that anyone connected with the laboratory
or the U.S. nuclear program ordered a hit on Hook. A
spokesman for the lab denounced the beating as "senseless
and brutal". [...]

When a triumphal George W. Bush declared his intention
to cash in on his "political capital" in the days after
the election, he was merely reaffirming his commitment
to hand over the reins of power to a higher authority
than even Dick Cheney. The religious right, with its
enormous political stake in the "End Times" outcome
of America's latest Imperial misadventures in Iraq and
Afghanistan, have seized upon Bush's continued pledge
to transform the "Homeland" into a locked down religious
theme park with the organizational zeal they had previously
reserved for bilking gullible parishioners out of their
social security checks.

Like Halliburton, Christ Inc. has become the latest
recipient of taxpayer largesse, having won the contract
to keep the media out of the news business, and to ensure
that power speaks to truth, as opposed to the other
way around. Purging the "news" of news is just the latest
attempt by religious Brownshirts to stamp their poisonous
insignia on every major institution that they don't
control lock, stock and barrel.

In recent months the escalating violence in Iraq and
mounting evidence of US-run torture chambers has been
dutifully ignored by the Christian News Network, a.k.a.
"The Missing White Girl Network" who never miss an opportunity,
these days, to provide their theo-con masters with a
platform to discredit the administration's naysayers
and whistleblowers. Instead, news consumers get trumped
up coverage of sensational celebrity trials, "heartwarming"
tales of rescue and survival (always thanks to Jesus)
and "special reports" revolving around the heroic law
enforcement figures as they "secure our borders," track
down "terrorists", and sniff out the latest Caucasian
corpse du jour. The message has become implicitly clear:
resistance is useless against an increasingly paranoid
and authoritarian state apparatus that has its finger
on the trigger, ready to blow away even unruly toddlers.

The endless parade of Christian pundits and security
analysts on CNN these days is more than an attempt by
the beleaguered cable giant to do one better than rival
news corps in "outfoxing" the competition. Not content
with FOX's spectacular success as the profit-driven
propaganda arm of the US government, the religious right
has set out to erase the distinction between the pulpit
and the news desk across the media spectrum (never a
wide one in the first place) -- a feat they have managed
to pull off with the cooperation of the nervous corporate
elites.

Just as the American definition of the term "liberal"
to mean "far left" is laughingly at odds with its intended
targets, i.e. House Democrats, Hollywood celebrities,
and anyone who reads the news on air outside of FOX
or any of its affiliates, the word "mainstream" is perhaps
as much a misnomer when describing America's radically
reconfigured media at the hands of bat wielding swastikas
like Bill Frist and "Doctor" James Dobson.

The New York Times' recent pledge to "improve" its
coverage of topics relating to rural and Heartland American
"values" is just another example of dunce-capped elites
publicly denouncing themselves in a desperate, last
ditch attempt to make nice-nice with the revolutionary
zealots ransacking their offices. Similarly, the sacrificial
offering of petty plagiarist Jayson Blair wasn't enough
to please the "sore winners" of the right, who won't
settle for anything less than unfettered control of
the medium right down to the wire. Dan Rather's roasting
of chickenhawk George Bush's National Guard service
merely stoked the theo-con appetite
for complete destruction at the personal and political
level, and gave them what amounted to a green light
to flatten, by any means necessary, every pocket of
potential resistance in their path.

Obviously, the suppression of media-based dissent
entails the purging if not complete destruction of PBS,
and along with it, any remaining standard of integrity
remaining in the television and radio broadcast industry.
After being forced into resignation by a Bush administration
ally who chairs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
the indomitable Bill Moyers remarked:

We're seeing unfold a contemporary example of the
age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch
and punish journalists who tell the stories that make
princes and priests uncomfortable...One reason I'm
in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW
didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism.
Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans,
liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists
to pretend they have done their job if, instead of
reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give
each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Moyers was immediately declared "insane" by drug-addled
propagandist Rush Limbaugh to his millions of self-described
"dittohead" fans. There is no reason to believe that
the last remaining example of independent investigative
reporting on free television -- PBS' Frontline -- will
survive the remainder of Bushtail's term.

With every revelation of corruption and ineptitude
at the leadership level, the lavishly funded, state-of-the-art
neo-con spin machine goes into warp drive to ensure
that anti-war voices are filtered through the rightwing
of the Democratic Party, or more recently, stamped out
altogether. As a result, the so-called "opposition"
has adopted the neo-con rallying cry of "staying the
course," as if prolonging and escalating the war would
somehow end it sooner rather than later, a strategy
recently tested in Vietnam. Talk about a "victory strategy"
for the masterminds behind the new and improved "Orwellian"
media.

You would think that the Times' support for the invasion
of Iraq with fabricated
"evidence" of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons
program would have forced the regime to come up with
more creative ways to impugn its potential critics than
branding them "biased". Then again, nothing mobilizes
the disgruntled many to the cause of defending the wealthy
few against the threat of taxes and secularism better
than the lame "liberal media" canard. Or to paraphrase
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of propaganda, "The
bigger and steamier your three-coiled whopper is, the
likelier it will be swallowed wholesale by the common
scum on the ground."

Fascists have always relied on the willingness of
so-called moderates on either side of the political
aisle to make alliances with them against their common
enemies of the Left. Hillary Clinton's recent decision
to team up with her former tormentor, Newt Gingrich,
on healthcare is another example of the Faustian bargains
centrist elites are willing to make with thuggish extremists,
hoping to score political points for appearing conciliatory.
Similarly, John Kerry's doomed campaign strategy of
offering voters a watered down version of White House
theology by mildly condemning gay rights and abortion,
didn't take into account that the anti-gay, misogynistic,
market-worshipping Zionists of the religious right only
put forth a pretend ideology based on "values" and "economics".
Upon closer inspection, this so-called agenda reveals
only emptiness at its core, bereft of any ideas beyond
a promise to use force when necessary against those
who refuse to "get with the pogrom."

The success of the Christian Right in dismantling
all existing institutions and re-shaping them to their
exact specifications depends on the ability of its leaders
to provoke an exalted state of outraged-tinged euphoria
within its rank and file members -- the "Hannitized"
hordes who feel a raw emotional need to feel part of
an enterprise engaged in exercising supreme power over
a despised enemy. This can only be achieved by the full
cooperation of the media, who fear their own irrelevance
in a highly volatile political atmosphere even more
than those who create these conditions in the first
place.

After Hitler was elected German Chancellor in 1933,
the novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary that he
was witnessing a revolution "without underlying ideas,
against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent,
against freedom, truth and justice."

Today's Hannitized hordes are every bit as eager as
Hitler's little helpers to sell out their own political
and economic interests for the privilege of basking
in the reflected glory of those who talk loudest while
carrying the biggest stick. Like all factory farmed
meat machines, they yield to the voices that carry the
most authority. If anything, they don't seem overly
alarmed by the absence of "news" in the media, particularly
in regard to Iraq, perhaps reassured by inanities like
the Jacko trial or Pope-o-Rama. Their "mobilizing passions"
are not stirred by any fully articulated philosophy
beyond a heightened suspicion that their entitlements
are being encroached upon by some demonized minority
-- a point that Democrats and their cohorts in the corporate
media have yet to grasp as they seek ways to accommodate
them by purging their own institutional bases of "offending"
doctrine. So far, they have only succeeded in emboldening
the cross-bearing Brownshirts to violently upgrade their
methods of rooting out dissent.

The "logic" of destroying a village in order to "save"
it can be applied to the media at the executive and
ownership level. Better to help engineer the takeover
of your organization by bible wielding Brownshirts than
to risk making enemies with these coup plotters, drunk
on their recent successes in subverting every other
major institution across the political and cultural
landscape. Having looted and pillaged America's crumbling
fourth estate, the information highway robbers may have
pulled off their biggest heist yet.

The Christian right
has launched a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns
aimed at corporate America -- and at its sponsorship of
entertainment, programs and activities they don't like.

Spurred on by a biblical injunction evangelicals call
"The Great Commission," and emboldened by George
W. Bush's re-election, which is perceived as a "mandate
from God," the Christian right has launched a series
of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate
America -- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs
and activities they don't like.

And it's working. Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald
Wildmon's American Family Association (AFA) announced
it was ending its boycott of corporate giant Procter &
Gamble -- maker of household staples like Tide and Crest
-- for being pro-gay. Why? Because the AFA's boycott (which
the organization says enlisted 400,000 families) had succeeded
in getting P&G to pull its millions of dollars in
advertising from TV shows like "Will & Grace"
and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." [... Lists
numerous successful boycotts]

All across the country, the Christian right and its allies
in the culture wars are mobilizing -- sometimes spurred
on from the top by the AFA, Focus on the Family, the Family
Research Council and similar national groups, but with
increasing frequency local pressure campaigns and boycott
threats are self-starters. They target everything from
local broadcast outlets and local cable operators to libraries,
bookstores, playhouses, cinemas and magazine outlets.

"The Christian right is incredibly mobilized,"
says Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition
Against Censorship, a 30-year-old alliance of 50 nonprofit
groups. Bertin says, "There's been an explosion of
local book and arts censorship -- a lot of activity by
an emboldened grassroots, who think they won the last
election on moral grounds. They barely need to threaten
a boycott to get those they target to back down -- hey,
nobody had to threaten to boycott PBS to get them to back
off Postcards From Buster." Bertin affirms that "This
new threat from below as well as above has already achieved
a widespread chill" on creative and entertainment
arts throughout the country.

A good example of successful up-from-below pressure in
making corporate America bend the knee to the Christian
right: the Microsoft Corp. Earlier this year, under pressure
from a local protest led by Ken Hutcherson -- a conservative
National Football League linebacker turned preacher --
Microsoft made a decision to stay neutral in the fight
over legislation in Washington's state Legislature banning
discrimination in employment against same-sexers, although
many other companies headquartered in the state took positions
in favor of the bill. But after an avalanche of counterprotests
to Microsoft about their cave-in to Hutcherson, from their
own employees (many of whom are gay), gay groups and the
blogosphere, Microsoft reversed itself and supported the
anti-discrimination bill. Too late: Two weeks earlier,
the bill had been defeated by just one vote in the state
Senate. Now, Microsoft is being targeted by a new, national
conservative Christian protest campaign for having flip-flopped
again.

Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at
the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls the
new offensive a drive toward "theocratic oligopoly.
The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling
as it is now in this country," adding that "e-mails
to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts"
in terms of their chilling effect.

Even The New York Times is feeling the chill. At the
beginning of May, an internal committee of 19 Times editors
and reporters, who'd been asked how to improve the paper's
"credibility" with a wider swath of America,
came up with a key recommendation: Deliberalize the paper's
news columns, especially through more coverage on religion
from a sympathetic point of view.

The committee's report, "Preserving Our Readers'
Trust," added that "the overall tone of our
coverage of gay marriage, as one example, approaches cheerleading.
By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter
-- gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone
else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is
in many corners of American social, cultural, and religious
life."

Oh, "disturbing" to whom? Why, to the Christian
right, of course -- whose email complaint campaigns against
the Times are legion: It's the paper the fundamentalists
love to hate. So why is the Times -- one of the few newspapers
in the latest available study of circulation released
earlier this year to significantly increase circulation
rather than lose it -- feeling the need to kowtow to the
religious opponents of gay marriage? The paper's willingness
to do so is about as frightening a testimony to creeping
theocracy as one could imagine.

Is the new conservative Christian anti-gay and anti-sex
crusade a back-to-the-future nightmare? Remember your
history: In the 1950s, the anti-Communist owners of a
small chain of supermarkets in upstate New York started
threatening the TV and radio networks with boycotts of
sponsors' products if they employed any persons listed
as supposed Communists or lefties, in a sloppily researched
little pamphlet called "Red Channels."

It didn't take long for this small protest to instill
fear throughout the broadcast industry, and the result
was the Blacklist, a witch-hunt that lasted for years
-- even after John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted star CBS-radio
host and actor, won his landmark $3.5 million libel suit
in 1962 against the blackmailers of AWARE Inc., which
-- for a suitable fee -- offered "clearance"
services to major media advertisers and radio and television
networks, investigating the backgrounds of entertainers
for signs of Communist sympathy or affiliation. But Faulk
didn't work in national broadcasting for another 13 years,
until he landed a spot on the TV series Hee-Haw in 1975.
It took that long to end a quarter-century reign of terror
in the entertainment industry, 18 years after Senator
Joe McCarthy was dead and buried.

Today's Christian right protests are targeting a different
kind of subversion. Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the
labor-funded Political Research Associates, has spent
over 25 years studying the far right and theocratic fundamentalism.
He is co-author of "Right-Wing Populism in America:
Too Close for Comfort."

Berlet -- who was one of the speakers at a conference
last month co-sponsored by the N.Y. Open Center and the
City University of New York Graduate Center on "Examining
the Real Agenda of the Christian Right" -- says that
"What's motivating these people is two things. First,
an incredible dread, completely irrational, of a hodgepodge
of sexual subversion and social chaos. The response to
that fear is genuinely a grassroots response, and it's
motivated by fundamentalist Christian doctrines like Triumphalism
and Dominionism, which order Christians to take over the
secular state and secular institutions. The Christian
right frames itself as an oppressed minority battling
the secular-humanist liberal homofeminist hordes."

The key to those doctrines is what fundamentalist religious
primitives call the Great Commission, which is basically
an injunction to convert everyone to Christianity. In
the Bible (Matthew 28:19-20), it says, "Go ye therefore,
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching
them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded
you . . ." The fundamentalist interpretations of
these and other texts can be found on evangelical Web
sites like Thegreatcommission.com, Transferableconcepts.com
and Gospelcom.net. They have incredible motivating power
for the religious right, and help explain the vehemence
of the Christian right's intolerance of the freedom of
others to think or act differently.

Says Berlet, "The re-election of Bush was a sort
of tipping point for these people, who take it as a mandate
from God -- they see that the leadership of America is
within their grasp, and when you get closer to your goal,
it's very energizing. It reaches a critical mass, in which
the evangelicals feel they have permission to push their
way into public and cultural policy in every walk and
expression of life."

All that, says Berlet, is what is motivating the skein
of conservative Christian boycotts, protest campaigns
and censorship drives bubbling from the bottom up -- which
get added emotional and pressure power from the fund-raising-driven
crusades launched by political Christian right organizations
like AFA at the national level. The confluence of from-above
and from-below is a powerful mix.

There's one big problem: Nobody at the national level
is tracking these censorship and pressure campaigns in
a systematic way, to quantify them or assess their impact,
so that strategies to defeat them can be developed.

"People for the American Way used to track this
stuff, but they stopped doing so systematically in 1996.
We at Political Research Associates would love to do it,"
says Berlet, "but we don't have the resources. Groups
like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute
or Americans United for Separation of Church and State
could easily do this sort of work. But none of us has
the money to do it, because nobody wants to give it. There
used to be three major journalists writing about this
stuff -- Sara Diamond, Russ Belant and Fred Clarkson.
But none of them could make a living doing it, and they've
all dropped out of the game."

Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast
industries, all want to live through an epoch of increasing
content blackmail and blacklists, the wealthy folks who
make a lot of money from those industries better wake
up and start funding intensive and systematic research
on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against
sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts -- or soon
it will be too late, and the "theocratic oligopoly"
of which Martin Kaplan speaks will be so firmly established
it cannot be dislodged.

What
if President Bush lied to Congress and the American
people, used those lies to gain congressional approval
for military action against Iraq and launched a war
that killed 1,700 Americans and tens of thousands of
others?

That might have been a hypothetical question a month
ago; it might not be hypothetical anymore.

In fact, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley, says the
answer to the question could lead to the impeachment
of President Bush.

The release of an explosive piece of paper called
the Downing Street Memo has Hinchey, almost 90 members
of Congress and people around the world in an uproar.

The memo provides the closest thing to proof Bush
may have lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
and led the nation into an unnecessary war, Hinchey
and others say.

"Attacking Iraq was something the administration focused
on from the very beginning," Hinchey said. "Bush made
the policy, then altered, twisted and distorted the
facts to fit the policy."

According to published reports in Britain, the Downing
Street Memo, written in July, 2002 details a conversation
in which British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Sir Richard
Dearlove, head of British intelligence, and British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw discuss a meeting held
with U.S. officials on Iraq.

In the memo, Dearlove warns Blair that Bush had already
decided to attack Iraq â months before Bush brought
the question to the U.N., and while he continued to
deny, both to Congress and publicly, any plans to do
so. Dearlove warned that Bush sought to justify that
policy by fabricating evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction and Iraqi links to Al Qaeda and the Sept.
11 terrorist attacks.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo
quotes Dearlove as saying. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam,
through military action, justified by the conjunction
of terrorism and WMD.
"But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed
around the policy."

The Times of London made the memo public May 1, and
has continued to hammer it in its pages.

High-ranking current and former members of both in
the British and U.S. governments have reportedly confirmed
the memo's authenticity.

Until now, the story has been largely ignored by the
U.S. news media and dismissed by the Bush administration.
But it has prompted massive interest and widespread
outrage abroad and is a hot topic on internet blogs.

In the U.S., that outrage is also growing.

On May 5, Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat,
sent a letter to Bush demanding answers about the memo.

"If the disclosure is accurate, it raises troubling
new questions regarding the legal justifications for
the war as well as the integrity of your own administration,"
Conyers wrote.

The letter was signed by 88 other members of Congress.
Conyers has at least 90,000 signatures on a petition
demanding the same, and hopes to have more than 500,000
soon.

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy has a similar petition,
and California Rep. Maxine Waters has vowed to introduce
daily amendments to pending House legislation demanding
Bush answer questions raised by the memo.

Hinchey signed Conyers' letter, and had harsh words
for Bush. "The Downing Street Memo confirms a lot of
information coming from insiders in the administration
and the intelligence agencies, and says clearly that
they fixed the facts around the policy," Hinchey said.

So far there has been no official response to Conyers'
letter.

"They are trying to ignore the letter, but we will
be back to them on this. We will continue to press this,"
Hinchey said. "It's outrageous. It goes against everything
this country stands for."

Representatives of both Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary
Clinton declined to comment directly on the memo or
on the House response to it.

Still, calls for a congressional inquiry into the
questions raised by the memo are growing louder, with
some even discussing a Bush impeachment.

"If the president intentionally twisted the facts
about the Sept. 11 attacks and the Iraq war, and lied
to Congress about it, and then elicited authorization
from Congress to launch a war that's caused the deaths
of 1,700 U.S. men and women along with tens of thousands
of others, that is definitely an impeachable offense,"
Hinchey said.

Wisconsin
Democrats are calling for the impeachment of President
George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Loyalists at this weekend's state party convention
in Oshkosh passed a resolution calling for Congress
to initiate impeachment proceedings against the three
officials for their role in the war in Iraq.

The resolution contends that the administration "lied
or misled" the United Nations, Congress, and the American
public about the justification for the war. It cites
the so-called "Downing Street memo" from British Prime
Minister Tony Blair's government, as well as reports
from U.N. weapons inspectors as evidence of widespread
deception.

"Democrats, not only in Wisconsin but throughout the
U.S., have been outraged by what we believe has been
a clear cover-up of why the U.S. went into Iraq," said
newly elected state party Chairman Joe Wineke.

Wineke said the resolution expresses the "the sense
of frustration that Democrats in Wisconsin have over
fighting a war for the wrong reasons."

Rory Carroll in
Baghdad and Gary Younge in New York
Tuesday June 14, 2005
The Guardian]

Appearing by turns
pensive and quizzical, Saddam Hussein returned to public
view yesterday when Iraq's special tribunal released
video images of the former president being interrogated.

The first official pictures since
his court appearance last July were mute but
a tribunal statement said he was being questioned about
a 1982 massacre at a Shia village north of Baghdad,
one of the cases expected to arise at his trial.

Saddam's chief lawyer, Khalil al-Duleimi, said he would
have to view the video before commenting. The
tribunal said Mr Duleimi was present during the filming.

However, a London-based member of the defence team,
Giovanni di Stefano, said
the former president was without legal assistance during
the video and that it would be inadmissible in
the trial.

The defence team has accused the tribunal of denying
it proper access to the ousted dictator, withholding
documents and leaking information to the press.

Comment: Each
time "Saddam" is dragged out into public view,
the evidence mounts that this man is NOT the real Saddam
Hussein. Last year at his first court appearance, video
and audio recordings of the event were severely restricted
by the US military. Now,
in his second court appearance, again the world, and
even his lawyers, are denied the opportunity to hear
"Saddam" give evidence in his own words, and
are provided only with short video segments where the
former dictator's words are interpreted for us by the
US military.

The stageshow that has been the fall of "Saddam"
bears all the hall marks of a American Psyops operation
and has already become little more than a farce, even
before he is officially brought before the courts to
answer the accusations against him.

In
an
interview given to Deborah Moore in July 2004, one
of Saddam's "lawyers", Giovanni Di Stefano,
stated categorically that Saddam would NOT face execution
and would NOT be handed over to Iranian authorities
who are seeking his extradition for alleged war crimes
during the Iran/Iraq war. When asked how he knew this
he stated that he would not say any more on the matter.

Interestingly, Di Stefano claims to have "the
greatest respect" for Salem Chalabi, nephew of
CIA asset and recently appointed Iraqi Deputy PM and
"oil minister", Ahmed Chalabi. An article
from the Arab-American Institute tell us that, not long
after the "fall of Baghdad" (a misnomer if
there ever was one):

Salem Chalabi established the
Iraq International Law Group (IILG), which describes
itself as "your professional gateway to the new
Iraq." Assisting Salem in setting up the IILG
was a partner Marc Zell (the IILG's website has been
registered in Zell's name). Zell is an Israeli settler
of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) stripe.
Here the plot thickens.

Zell had for many years been
Feith's partner in their Washington-Tel Aviv law firm,
Feith and Zell (FANDZ). FANDZ had been set up when
Feith left government to pursue the work of a "foreign
agent" representing Turkey and some Israeli interests.

Following the Baghdad opening
of the IILG, Zell soon opened, in the U.S., an office
for Zell, Goldberg & Co., which promises to assist
"American companies in their relations with the
U.S. government in connection with Iraq's reconstruction
projects." It is interesting to note that Zell,
Goldberg still uses the website FANDZ, the site of
the old Feith and Zell firm. So when Zell boasts his
connections to government, businesses know exactly
what is meant.

In the relatively short period
of time since the fall of the Ba'ath Party regime,
IILG and Zell, Goldberg have facilitated contracts
in the tens, possibly hundreds of millions of dollars.

Salem Chalabi incidentally
has also been appointed by the Coalition Provisional
Authority to head the Iraqi tribunal that will investigate
and prosecute the crimes Saddam and his cohorts committed
against the Iraqi people. His uncle is meanwhile railing
against the former regime's corruption and demanding
the right to investigate profiteering and kick-backs
he alleges occurred in the UN's food for oil program.

Feith and Chalabi were at the forefront of the plundering
of Iraq's resources in order to fill the coffers of
American and Israeli big business. Feith also promised
the Israelis and their U.S. supporters that, not only
would post-Saddam Iraq trade with Israel, but it would
resurrect the Iraq-Israel pipeline for oil export. Given
that Chalabi is clearly in bed with the Neocons - the
architects of the illegal Iraq war - AND the chief prosecutor
of Saddam, it is a little troubling, although not at
all surprising, that one of Saddam's lawyers would have
the "greatest respect" for him.

Even
less surprising then, is the news that Di Stefano is
a convicted fraudster with a client list of mostly mass
murderers, and with his praise for a liar and thief
like Chalabi who could be shocked to learn that Di Stefano
may
not actually be a lawyer at all.

Such
sordid relationships between repugnant reprobates simply
add to our suspicions that the entire ongoing Saddam
capture and trial is nothing more than a carefully planned
publicity stunt, employing a fake Saddam periodically
pulled out on stage in order to maintain the illusion.
The producers of this dodgy drama are, however, extremely
careful to limit the exposure of their lead actor, lest
the truth that he is an imposter should become more
apparent than it already is.

WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- The Senate on Monday formally apologized for having
blocked decades of efforts to make lynching a federal
crime as victims' descendants watched from the chamber
gallery.

On a voice vote and without opposition, the Senate
passed a resolution expressing its regrets to the nearly
5,000 Americans -- mostly black males -- who were documented
as having been lynched from 1880 to 1960.

These deaths occurred mostly in the
South, often with the knowledge of local officials who
preached white supremacy, fanned racial hatred and allowed
mob lynchings to become picture-taking, public spectacles.

During this period, nearly 200 anti-lynching
bills were introduced in Congress, three of which passed
the House of Representatives.

But despite the support of the legislation by seven
U.S. presidents, the Senate prevented all the measures
from becoming law, with much of the opposition coming
from southern lawmakers who raised procedural roadblocks.

Such legislation would have made lynching a federal
crime and allowed the U.S. government to prosecute those
responsible, including local law enforcement officers.

SIGNATURES MISSING

Dan Duster, a descendant of Ida B. Wells, a former
slave who became an anti-lynching crusader, praised
senators who publicly backed the resolution of apology
and scorned those who did not.

No lawmaker opposed the measure,
but 20 of the 100 senators had not signed a statement
of support of it shortly before a vote was taken on
a nearly empty Senate floor. [...]

While most lynching victims were deemed criminal suspects,
others had merely gotten into a spat with a white man,
perhaps for looking at a white woman. Lynchings refer
not only to hangings, but mob executions by beatings,
bullets and fire.

Comment: While
it is extremely troubling that 20% of US Senators REFUSED
to sign a resolution apologising for, and by implication
condemning, the killing of innocent blacks, this resolution
goes a long way to closing the book on one of the most
barbaric episodes of recent US history.

On a broader scale however, any self-righteousness
that the US body politic might derive from this official
apology is surely cut short by the fact that the Bush
regime, and most of both houses, continue to openly
sanction the murder of Iraqi civilians by the 185,000
American citizens that make up the US invasion force
in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add to this the $billions in non-repayable loans (grants)
that Congress approves each year to the state of Israel
which allow it to continue to murder and oppress innocent
Palestinians, and you might get the impression that,
while the faces have changed, the racist ideology that
gripped American politics and society in the first half
of the 20th century is still alive and well.

By Philip Webster, David Charter
and Anthony Browne
The Times Online
June 14, 2005

TONY BLAIR and Jacques Chirac are
set for an icy Paris showdown today after the Prime
Minister accused the French President of living in the
past and France lost its fight to save the ill-fated
constitutional treaty.

As their dispute over Britain's EU budget rebate and
the constitution took relations to their lowest point
for years, Mr Blair responded to M Chirac's refusal
to hold a joint press conference with him today by letting
it be known that he would stage one on his own at the
British Embassy in the French capital.

In a fresh twist last night, Mr Blair was told publicly
by Peter Mandelson, his close ally, that he must be
prepared to reform the British rebate as part of a deeper
rethink about the EU budget.

In an intervention that some
ministers described as unhelpful, the EU Trade Commissioner
and fervent European pre-empted future negotiations
by saying that it was wrong to ask the poorer accession
states to pay for any part of the British rebate.
He also admonished ministers for their "neo-Thatcherite"
tone in dealing with Brussels, and said that it should
change when Britain assumes the EU presidency next month
if it wanted to make progress.

The pressure on Mr Blair mounted last night when Gerhard
Schröder, the German Chancellor, called on him
to compromise in the budget dispute, but ruled out any
big changes in the agricultural budget before 2013.
He backed M Chirac's stand that the deal on agriculture
done in 2002 could not be reopened, as Mr Blair had
suggested.

Herr Schröder said: "We need to get our act
together and strike a fair compromise where everybody
needs to chip in."

There was, however, a boost for Mr
Blair when Herr Schröder backed Britain's desire
to see overall spending capped at 1 per cent of the
EU's gross national income.

Mr Blair and M Chirac's confrontation comes as the
fallout from the French and Dutch rejections of the
constitution began threatening EU policies across the
board. Ministers shelved plans to press on with the
ratification process, Britain
intends to use its EU presidency to demand a radical
overhaul of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP),
and several member states have begun questioning the
pace of EU enlargement before Turkish membership talks.

M Chirac's move over the press briefing was an unprecedented
rebuff for a visiting prime minister. But Mr Blair,
in Moscow for talks with President Putin, eschewed diplomatic
niceties by directly attacking the French leader's intransigence.
He accused M Chirac, by focusing attention on the rebate,
of closing his ears to the message from his voters when
they rejected the constitution.

Mr Blair raised eyebrows on arriving in Berlin last
night by going straight into lengthy talks with Angela
Merkel, the conservative opposition leader who is well
placed to defeat Herr Schröder in the general election
in September. The Prime Minister appeared to be heading
for victory in his efforts to get the constitution kicked
into the longest possible grass. Foreign
ministers yesterday abandoned plans to approve the constitution
by the end of 2006, and left it to individual countries
to decide whether to hold their referendums.

"The context of this discussion is one in which
two countries have now voted against the EU constitution,"
Mr Blair said. "Why? Because people in Europe did
not feel that sufficient attention was being paid to
their concerns about Europe and its future.

"Now, when we come to discussing the future financing
of the EU, let us bear that in mind. And let us realise,
therefore, that we cannot discuss the existence of the
British rebate unless we discuss the whole of the financiang
of the European Union.

"It is not that we approach this simply saying,
'Britain says no and that is an end to the discussion.'
We are happy to have this discussion. But it has got
to be on a realistic basis and it cannot be on the basis
that ignores the unfairness that gave rise to the existence
of the British rebate.

"The future financing and reforms of Europe must
mean fundamental changes, in particular in respect of
the Common Agricultural Policy and the amount of the
budget that it takes up each year."

In Paris there was talk of bad blood between the two
leaders. Philippe Douste-Blazy, the new French Foreign
Minister, said that Britain had no alternative to dropping
its refusal to trim the budget rebate that it has enjoyed
since 1984.

He said that the crisis in Europe caused by the French
and Dutch rejection of the EU Constitution made it vital
to show that the Union could settle its next six-year
spending plan at this week's summit. "We
are more than ever condemned to a compromise. The British
must take into consideration the circumstances in which
they obtained their 'cheque' in 1984. They were in serious
recession at the time. Today, their growth is strong."

Mr Blair is expected to tell M Chirac
that he will not hesitate to wield Britain's veto even
if all 24 other EU states press him to drop the rebate.
He will only consent to reduce it if France accepts
cuts to the CAP, which benefits France far more than
any other state.

While most other EU states dislike the rebate, M Chirac
has made a personal cause out of combating it over the
past two weeks. His aggressive approach is seen by diplomats
and some French politicians as a diversion from the
humiliation that voters inflicted on him in the referendum
on May 29.

Hello, my name is Moshe, the police officer who knocks
on the door will say. I am here by the force of a Knesset
decision and by law, and I'm asking you to accompany
me and board the bus that will take you away from here.

If you need help carrying your belongings, he will
say, I have a team here with me that would be glad to
offer assistance. We can also assist you in carrying
young children.

The proposal to begin the evacuation in early morning
hours, before sunrise, was rejected by officials in
early discussions. In the final briefing, minutes before
the forces move in, the senior commanders will remind
the troops the people they are about to remove from
their homes are Israeli citizens.

"They are not our enemies.
We will not surprise them in their beds, we won't take
crying babies out of their cribs," the commanders
will say. "We have time. Nothing is urgent. If
the family asks for another minute, five minutes, fifteen
minutes, give it to them. After all, those people planted
the trees in their backyard with their own hands."[...]

Comment: The
words of the commander above are interesting in that
they give a clear example of how the IDF treats innocent
Palestinians civilians. Because the troops that he is
addressing will have come from months or years of duty
in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the commander obviously
felt the need to impress on his men that they should
not treat the illegal Israeli settlers with the same
disrespect and brutality so often used in the Palestinian
occupied territories.

In Rafah, in Ramallah, in Hebron, innocent Palestinians
are by now accustomed to being "surprised in their
beds" at night, the point of an Israeli rifle shoved
in their faces and the trigger often pulled. Likewise,
Palestinian children have grown up with the fear of
seeing one of their friends deliberately shot through
the head while sitting in a ramshackle classroom, or
gunned down in the street and finished off, just to
make sure. If a Palestinian
family asks for "another minute, five minutes,
fifteen minutes," to gather together some possessions,
they risk being buried along with them, as has occurred
so often in the past. Such is the nature of the Israeli
tactic of "collective punishment." Such is
the value that the Israeli government and military place
on a Palestinian life.

Parliamentary speaker David Hawker told the House of
Representatives that the package was found in the parliamentary
mailroom on Tuesday morning.

He did not specify the nature of the package but said
another three letters that sparked security measures
over the past two weeks had contained white powder that
proved to be harmless.

Hawker said he had ordered procedures for handling
parliamentary mail to be tightened and advised political
staffers to be on the lookout for suspicious mail.

"I strongly condemn the behaviour that has made
this a necessity," he said.

Last week the embassies of the United
States, Britain, Japan, South Korea and Italy and the
parliament all received powder-filled envelopes, while
the Indonesian embassy was targeted the previous week.

Prime Minister John Howard linked the initial attacks
to public outrage in Australia at an Indonesian court
imposing a 20-year jail term on Australian woman Schapelle
Corby for smuggling marijuana into the resort island
of Bali.

Police have admitted they have no idea about the motive
for the subsequent letters.

PULWAMA,
India: Fourteen-year-old Raziya Bilal had solved the
second of the five problems in her Maths test paper,
her classmates Mushtaq Ahmad and Muneer were struggling
with the first when a powerful car bomb ripped through
their single-storey school building and a row of shops
in Pulwama, just 50 m from a CRPF camp, killing eight
persons, including three CRPF men instantly and wounding
more than 100.

Six more persons, including two students, later succumbed
to their injuries raising the toll to 14.

The toll, doctors at Srinagar's SMHS hospital suspected,
would rise given the critical condition of many of the
injured. No group has claimed responsibility for the
attack so far.

The blast comes a day after Hizbul chief Syed Salahuddin
said in Pakistan that there was going to be no let-up
in militancy in the Valley. But in a faxed statement
from Muzaffarabad on Monday evening, the Hizbul condemned
the incident.

Just a month ago, suspected militants had tossed a
grenade near a city missionary school here killing two
children.

Soiled with mud and blood, Raziya's answer book laid
scattered among scores of white sheets in the school
compound where just an hour ago they had sat on coir
mats rolled out on the floor.

A few plastic chairs, for the invigilators, had been
tossed hundreds of metres away. Metal shards, smashed
glass panes, charred wood, and bricks were scattered
all around. Two limbs of a dog and metal shrapnel from
the car, believed to be have been fitted with the 45-kg
IED were strewn in the compound and the busy market,
the row of shops next to the school.

So strong was the blast that eyewitnesses recalled
hearing it from a considerable distance. A huge crater
on the Pulwama-Shopian highway, two smashed Marutis,
a truck reduced to nearly half its size, littered the
road almost half a kilometre away.

"I was walking outside the school when I heard a loud
bang. At first, I took it for a sonic boom. I thought
it came from a plane or a helicopter in the sky," said
eyewitness Mansoor Ahmad, a government employee.

"Moments later, I saw smoke rising above, I rushed
towards the school. Within minutes, several of us got
busy removing people from the road, the school and the
shops. In one minute, everything had changed."

At the hospital, crying relatives and friends poured
in from across the Valley to check on their dear ones.

The fact that it was exam time in the school helped.
Said Ejaz Ahmad, a Class VIII student: "Our seniors
were taking their exams in the compound and we were
on the right side of the building. Had students been
in the rooms on the left side, more than 100 would have
got killed."

Ahmad and many witnesses said that at first there
was confusion that the bomb was Ìair-droppedÃ® by security
forces but later when police told the mob that it was
a car bomb, people became furious. Raising anti-India
slogans, they pelted stones at the police, which retaliated
by firing in the air and tear-gas.

"ÌIt was a mere coincidence that there was a sonic
boom at the time of the bomb blast. Moreover some people
in the crowd wanted to exploit the situation and malign
the forces," said Javeed Maqdoomi, Kashmir's Inspector
General of Police. He blamed the militants for the act.
[...]

Chinese bloggers,
even on foreign-sponsored sites, have been advised to
choose their words carefully after Microsoft joined
China in censoring web messages.

Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corporation's
new China-based web portal get a scolding message each
time they input words deemed taboo
by the communist authorities -
such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

"Prohibited language in text, please delete,"
the message says.

However, the restrictions appear to apply only to the
subject line of such entries. Writing them into the
text, with a more innocuous subject heading, seems not
to be a problem.

Microsoft staff in China could not be reached immediately
for comment.

However, a spokesman at the tech giant's headquarters
in Seattle acknowledged that the company was cooperating
with the Chinese government to censor its Chinese-language
web portal.

Comment: Even
as Bill Gates writes large cheques to the Republican
party and as George Bush proclaims Americas a bastion
of Freedom and Democracy, Microsoft, probably the pre-eminent
US global corporation, is willingly facilitating the
suppression of democracy,
freedom and human rights in China. Hypocrisy? Not at
all, it's simply globalisation or "the American
way".

Astronomers announced Monday the
discovery of the smallest planet so far found outside
of our solar system.

About seven-and-a-half times as massive as Earth, and
about twice as wide, this new extrasolar planet may
be the first rocky world ever found orbiting a star
similar to our own.

"This is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected
and the first of a new class of rocky terrestrial planets,"
said team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington. "It's like Earth's bigger cousin."

Currently around 150 extrasolar planets are known,
and the number continues to grow. But most of these
far-off worlds are large gas giants like Jupiter. Only
recently have astronomers started detecting smaller
massed objects. [...]

Interior Minister Jorge Correa said there could be
more victims in some isolated communities, but added
no details were immediately available because of poor
communications.

The quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.9, according
to both the U.S. Geological Survey and Chilean officials,
making it the world's third strongest temblor since
the quake that set off an Asian tsunami in December.

Correa said a boulder fell on an automobile killing
all five passengers - three adults and two children
- near Iquique, a port city 1,930 kilometres north of
Santiago, the capital. The other victims were three
elderly men killed in two different Andean villages.
One of the victims was a disabled 80-year-old man killed
when a wall collapsed at his home.

The government emergency bureau in Iquique, a coastal
city 320 kilometres from the epicentre, said several
people were injured but did not provide a number or
other details.

The quake struck at 6:44 p.m. and was centred in an
unpopulated Andean area, about 1,500 kilometres north
of Santiago. It was also felt in several cities in southern
Peru and Bolivia, but no victims or damage were reported
in either neighbouring country. In the Bolivian capital
of La Paz, many people took to the streets in panic.

Power supply and communications were interrupted in
the port cities of Iquique, and Arica, near Chile's
northern border with Peru, but were being gradually
restored hours after the quake.

An
earthquake along California's most active fault shook
shelves and rattled nerves in the Coachella Valley and
throughout Southern California on Sunday morning.

The magnitude-5.6 temblor struck at 8:41 a.m. more
than eight miles below the ground surface near the mountain
community of Anza, about 20 miles south of Palm Springs.

In the Coachella Valley, ground shaking rattled homes,
knocked items from some store shelves and disrupted
the Sunday morning calm of the quake-prone region.

But there were no reports of serious damage or injuries
in the valley or elsewhere in Southern California.

"It felt like something was coming up from under the
ground," said Govind Lalani, co-owner of the Indio Village
Market. "I was a little nervous."

At the market containers fell to the floor and broke,
spilling their contents, he said.

It took about 45 minutes to an hour to clean up the
mess, but the store remained open.

Coachella Valley law enforcement agencies and fire
departments reported no incidents of injuries or major
damage.

"There was broken glass in some businesses, but very
minor damage," said Sgt. William Hall of the Indio Police
Department.

Capt. Jackie Williams of the Riverside County Fire
Department/California Department of Forestry said there
were reports of things falling off shelves and some
ceiling tiles falling, but no major damage.

It was the second magnitude-3 or greater quake in
the Anza area in the last three days. A magnitude-3.1
temblor struck there Thursday.

Sunday's earthquake rattled homes,
business and nerves in the Coachella Valley, but
its origin was beneath the mountain town of Anza.

The two greatest quakes with epicenters
in the valley occurred in 1948 and 1986.

The magnitude-5.6 Desert Hot Springs
quake in 1948 did damage as far away as Los Angeles.

The magnitude-6.0 North Palm Springs
earthquake in 1986 injured 29 people and destroyed
51 homes in Palm Springs and Morongo Valley

Scientists say the San Andreas fault,
which runs through the valley north of Interstate
10, could unleash an earthquake of magnitude-8 or
greater.

Other recent major quakes in the
desert near the Coachella Valley include a magnitude-6.0
in Joshua Tree and a magnitude-7.3 in Landers in
1992 and the magnitude-7.1 Hector Mine quake 32
miles north of Joshua Tree in 1999.

For most people, the earthquake that rattled the Coachella
Valley on Sunday morning was over seconds after it started.

But for the people charged with watching seismic monitors
posted near the quake's epicenter about 20 miles south
of Palm Springs, aftershocks from the Sunday temblor are
still rolling in by the hundreds.

Seismologists say the volume of aftershocks can vary
dramatically depending on the size of the quake.

The fact that Sunday's quake - originally measured as
a magnitude-5.6 then downgraded to 5.2 - happened in the
middle of a network of sensors also contributes to the
high number of recorded aftershocks.

"We've seen 5s with two aftershocks. We've seen
5s with 1,000 aftershocks," said Lucy Jones, scientist
in charge for Southern California for the U.S. Geological
Survey.

By Monday evening, sensors near Anza, the epicenter of
the Sunday-morning quake, had registered 339 quakes, although
they were mostly well below a magnitude that would be
felt on the surface.

As for whether the quake portends something greater on
the horizon, that's anyone's guess.

The likelihood that any given quake is a foreshock to
something greater is about 5 percent to 10 percent in
the moments after the original temblor.

But that likelihood drops fast. Within 24 hours it is
less than 1percent.

The notion that people don't know how severe a quake
will be until it's over and the unsettling feeling of
the ground moving underfoot makes earthquakes one of nature's
more unnerving phenomena.

An online message board at www.thedesertsun.com recorded
responses to Sunday's quake from the people who felt it.

"When I made it into my living room things were
falling off walls, shelves and my antique free-standing
piano was rocking back and forth, thought it was going
to fall down," stated one posting attributed to Tracie
Jo in Salton City. "

Elisa Nunez Oleary of Palm Desert, in another posting,
described how even longtime residents of California can
be shaken by earthquakes.

"Growing up and living mostly in earthquake countries
and cities is still hard to get (used) to it."

If
a giant magnitude 9 earthquake strikes someday along
the coast of the Pacific Northwest, or
if, against all odds, an errant asteroid plunges into
the ocean many miles off California,
a monstrous tsunami could drown low-lying lands all
up and down the continent's western edge -- and
now a UC Santa Cruz scientist has calculated the sweep
of such an event.

Spurred by the tragedy of December's great Sumatra
quake and the hundreds of thousands of deaths claimed
by the waves that swept across the Indian Ocean, geophysicist
Steven Ward has estimated the
heights that a similar quake-spawned tsunami would reach,
running up along the shores from British Columbia as
far south as the tip of Baja California.

"We need to know what the tsunami dangers are along
any coastal area," Ward says, "and as our instruments
and technology and modeling techniques improve, so we
can refine our ability to forecast what might happen."

Using knowledge gleaned from evidence of a magnitude
9 quake in the Cascadia subduction zone some 300 years
ago, the behavior of last December's Sumatra quake,
careful scrutiny of detailed ocean bottom data all along
the Pacific Coast and what he calls "the laws of water
physics," Ward has created a hazard map that shows what
may happen should another major quake hit the same area
in the future. The Cascadia zone is a region where the
eastern edge of a great undersea slab of the Earth's
crust, called the Juan de Fuca Plate, is continually
diving beneath the west edge of the North American Plate
and thrusting the continental side of the crust upward.

To model the event's effects, Ward assumes that in
a huge quake on the Cascadia subduction zone, the two
crustal plates would abruptly slip apart vertically
by at least 50 feet in three successive blocks from
south to north, generating a 9.2 magnitude quake. Aside
from enormous quake damage on land for hundreds of miles,
Ward estimates the resulting
tsunami would pile a wave more than 20 feet high crashing
onto the Oregon-Washington coast, inundating Seattle
and the entire Puget Sound region as well as Portland
and the mouth of the Columbia River.

Crescent City in California's Del Norte County --
where a smaller tsunami killed 11 people in 1964 after
a magnitude 9 Alaska quake -- would see a wave of more
than 11 feet, and the tsunami sweeping the coast at
the Golden Gate and Monterey Bay would be more than
10 feet . At Santa Barbara, Ward calculates, the wave
height would be 6.5 feet, and smaller waves would crash
against the shore as far south as the tip of Baja California.

"These calculations are still rough," Ward concedes,
"but they do indicate a level of danger that needs to
be considered."

The evidence of the great temblor 300 years ago was
discovered along the coast of Washington and Oregon
by Brian Atwater, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist
in Seattle. And Japanese scientists deciphering old
tsunami records in their coastal towns calculated that
the event had sent a major wave speeding across the
Pacific in 10 hours to damage many coastal villages
on Honshu, Japan's main island.

Another giant earthquake is
nearly a certainty in the unstable coastal regions of
Oregon and Washington, but many scientists are also
considering the effect of an event that would have no
precedent in recorded history -- and
have concluded that an even greater tsunami might be
generated if an asteroid were ever to plunge into the
ocean off the West Coast.

Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, the Apollo 9 lunar module
commander who is now a retired businessman in Tiburon,
has created a foundation with the intention of persuading
government agencies to plan for the possibility of an
asteroid impact in the ocean -- admittedly, the astronaut
says, no more than a 10,000-to-1 chance, but one that
could wreak havoc on coastal communities. The specific
asteroid that worries him most has been designated by
NASA astronomers as 2004MN4, and it is expected to pass
within 26,600 miles of Earth less than 25 years from
now.

Scientists at NASA's Near Earth Object Program, which
tracks the course of some 70 comets and asteroids that
appear to be headed somewhere within thousands of miles
of the Earth, calculate that 2004MN4 should make its
closest approach to Earth on April 13, 2029, when it
will be vividly in sight for everyone on Earth to watch.
But a collision with Earth is impossible that year,
they have reported -- and, they say, "no subsequent
Earth encounters in the 21st century are of concern."

Schweickart, however, has concluded there is a remote
possibility that the asteroid would collide with Earth
in 2036. He and his foundation are urging Congress to
send a spacecraft to the asteroid before 2014 to put
a radio transponder on the object, which would define
the asteroid's trajectory far more accurately than any
other technique.

"While the probability of a highly destructive impact
in the immediate future is slight," Schweickart says,
"the consequence of such an occurrence is extreme, and
mitigation efforts should begin now."

Schweickart enlisted Ward to determine what kind of
tsunami might be created if the asteroid did crash in
the Pacific in 2036.

And Ward's calculations indicate
a tsunami from the crash would be far more devastating
than anything known in history: Peak wave heights, he
said, would reach 17 feet in southern Alaska, more
than 55 feet all along the California coast, 15
feet in Hawaii, and 20 feet at Puerto Vallarta, the
Pacific beach resort in Mexico.

Schweickart maintains that if the transponder were
to indicate the object's course makes a collision more
likely, there could then be time to conceive, plan,
design and launch some kind of unspecified "deflection
mission."

"Either way, our course of action is clear," he says.
"We either plan another series of cocktail parties to
watch the asteroid go by in 2036 -- as we will have
done in 2029 -- or we mount the most important space
mission in human history."

A cyclone hit a village in eastern Georgia, tearing
roofs off houses, tossing people into the air and injuring
13, emergency response officials said Monday.

Tamaz Apakidze, an official in the emergencies department
of the Georgian Interior Ministry, said that the cyclone
Sunday in the village of Iormuganlo in the Sagaredzhoisky
region, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north-east of
the capital Tbilisi, threw about 40 people several meters
(yards) into the air.

Six of the injured were hospitalised. Several dozen
domestic animals were killed and houses were severely
damaged, he said.

"It happened all of a sudden, and lasted three or
four minutes, according to witness accounts," Apakidze
said.

Dozens of houses, kilometres (miles) of roads and
a bridge were destroyed in a deluge in the same region
of Georgia, said Georgy Natsvlishvili, a deputy from
the Sagaredzhoisky region.

He said the heavy rains had prevented officials from
visiting the affected villages to make a fuller accounting.

TAIPEI : Floods caused by torrential rains have claimed
three lives and forced authorities to evacuate hundreds
of residents from low-lying areas in Taiwan, officials
said.

A 65-year-old woman was buried alive by a mudslide
at Tsochen, a mountainous town in the southern county
of Tainan, the National Fire Agency said Monday. It
added that the body of a 24-year-old motorcyclist who
was washed away in the southern county of Pingtung on
Sunday had been found.

Another man was killed in Pingtung when he tried to
disconnect a plug in his flooded home and was electrocuted.

Thousands of homes in Pingtun were cut off by the
floods and the military evacuated hundreds of people
including an elderly people's home.

Agriculture authorities said dozens of southern mountainous
villages were at risk of landslides. The Central Weather
Bureau warned of persistent torrential rain over the
next few days.

Two airports in Pingtung were closed and landslides
blocked roads. Some schools in Pingtung and the nearby
county of Kaohsiung were closed.

The US government's
elaborate cover-up of mad cow dangers in the United States
has begun to unravel. Twenty-four hours after our successful
protest with Organic Consumers Association of a US Department
of Agriculture mad cow safety stunt in St. Paul, USDA
Secretary Johanns was forced to admit that a cow tested
last year and declared safe in fact DID have mad cow disease.

I've often charged that the USDA is hiding US cases of
mad cow by using the wrong testing procedures and by failing
to conduct food safety tests on millions of animals and
this announcement proves it. USDA finally used the correct
test - the Western Blot test - on this suspect animal
and it has proven to be a case of mad cow disease.

Here at the Center for Media and Democracy we will continue
to work hard on this issue until the US goes beyond lip-service
and does what the EU countries and Japan have done: implement
a science-based food-safety testing program that tests
millions of cattle a year. And, the US must put in place
a REAL "fire-wall feed ban" that would stop
the current feeding of billions of pounds of blood, meat,
bone meal, animal fat and poultry feces to cattle in the
US. These on-going feed practices amplify and spread mad
cow disease.

The US news media has mostly failed to expose mad cow
risks in the US. Instead, as with so many other issues,
the corporate media has become an echo chamber for industry
and government, confusing the public into thinking that
the correct steps have been taken. [...]